This came out in 2001 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
There’s a fine line between illumination and exploitation — and it’s tough to tell where the Joplin compilation Love, Janis falls.
The companion album to a stage musical, this CD has a set of Janis’s best-loved cuts interspersed with readings of letters home to family. Admittedly, at times it’s interesting to hear Janis’s story in her own words as she goes from starry-eyed dreamer to disillusioned rocker in a few short years. But the sanitised version of events — she wasn’t about to write Ma and Pa about her drug use and promiscuity — and the annoying impersonator who overemotes like a dinner-theatre Blanche DuBois on the spoken-word segments leave you both unsatisfied and slightly guilty, as if you’d read her diary but missed all the good bits. Everyone knows Janis liked to bare her soul, but I’m not sure this is what she had in mind.
